Abstract
BRUNO'S METAPHYSICS AND GEOMETRY.—“La Doctrine Metaphysique et Geometrique de Bruno,” by Dr. Xenia Atanassievitch (Paris: Les Presses Universitaires de France), is not only a fascinating historical study of the great sixteenth - century pioneer of modern science but it is also of first-rate present scientific interest. Dr. Atanassievitch would appear to be a pupil or a colleague of Dr. Petronievics, the professor of philosophy at Belgrade, recently in Great Britain working at the reconstruction of Archæopteryx, and advocate of a finitistic theory of space, that is, the theory that space is composed of discrete units and is not continuous. Dr. Petronievics holds that only by means of such a theory is it possible to reconcile the paradoxes of Zeno, and we may discover the original form of his argument in this study of Bruno. Like Lucretius, Bruno set forth his philosophical arguments in metrical form, and there can be no doubt that his writings influenced very definitely the mathematical and physical sciences in the seventeenth century. The change which took place in the method of scientific research under the lead of Galileo and Descartes was largely to the credit of mechanical inventions,—the telescope and the microscope,—and it is of extraordinary interest to compare the unaided speculations of Bruno with the new form the theories assumed under the control of experiment. All the distinctions which exercised the philosophers of the seventeenth century—the distinction between the mathematical, the physical, and the metaphysical unit, the geometrical difficulty Descartes encountered in his conception of subtle matter and his rejection of the void, the difficulty for physics which Male-branche discovered in the idea of a minimum sensibile, the metaphysical difficulty Leibniz met with in relating God to the monads—are expounded in Bruno, mixed up indeed with much fantastic mythology. In the valuable criticism which follows her able exposition, Dr. Atanassievitch claims for Petronievics that his reconstitution of Bruno's idea is the only satisfactory solution of modern fundamental physical problems.
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Research Items. Nature 116, 257–258 (1925). https://doi.org/10.1038/116257a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/116257a0